Advertisement

November 2014

11/26/2014

Although I have written about the problems of Tor and its ethics-free coders and developers, and have an entire e-book on the subject of Snowden and his hacker helpers and the issues of Tor, Yasha Levine continues not to link to me and merely to poach from me.

The second part of the title is exactly the problem: Tor advocates demand invincible personal encryption, which they can use as anarchists to overthrow the state and remain blind to criminal use by child pornographers, money-launderers, drug-dealers or the assassins that accompany these businesses.

Yasha Levine is one of those Russians who never criticizes the Kremlin -- he's one of those Soviet emigres with something like nostalgia for the good old days, and believes evil capitalists and Yeltsin ruined Russia in the 1990s, and Putin "restored order." When I tried to place him and his sidekick Mark Ames of the old Exile, I call them "techno-Stalinists" because "techno-communists" doesn't even begin to describe their rabid hatred for America, the West, capitalism and corporations, and their vague utopian communist ideals that they never quite admit but viciously defend against all perceived enemies.

Levine has done several scathing articles on Tor, blasting it merely because it is funded by the US government, and never examining the real issues of crime and lack of ethics in this software -- which is a weapon. For Levine, the discovery -- that everyone else in the encryption business or watching Snowden was long since aware of -- that Tor was developed by the Navy and funded by the Department of Defense was somehow "news."

After slamming Tor merely for its association with the US government, his latest piece whines that he is smeared by the Tor staff, all of whom are on Uncle Sam's payroll even as the claim to be fighting The Man.

The Tor staff has behaved as badly as they always do, writing nasty slams and making preposterous claims for their coders' cult.

When I published my critiques ,I had threats of law suits, harassment, hordes of Anonymous creeps bombarding my Twitter feed with porn links, freezing of my blog with the comments bombarded, etc., doxing -- all the usual bullshit from this bunch -- merely because I questioned their ethics -- something that Yasha Levine never does, because for him, the mere association with the US government is enough to damn them.

Levine seems incapable of realizing that anarchists are happy to take over the state when it is weak and do what they want, and exploit it even for undoing that state. The problem isn't the state, the most liberal in history. The problem is the ethical anarchists.

Why? Because I come to the conclusion that the problem is unethical hackers, that the government per se is not evil. And that flies in the face of his effort here, which is to tie Tor to the government, and by that link alone prove that it is evil. This is childish and myopic.

Levine ignores my main thesis, which is that Tor itself is unethical by nature because it is built on the premise that it is okay for the military to make a weapon, then take human shields to use it. THAT is the core problem.

The reason Levine ignores this is he wants to reserve the weapon of code for his favourite political movements, anti-American hackers and activists, and doesn't want to concede that code is a weapon, because to do so would mean repudiating his claim -- and the claim of hackers -- that code is neutral or code is good or that the code-weapon should be given to his favourite political groups.

But code isn't neutral, because developers weld into their code their life views, and in this case, not only the idea of taking humans as shields is wrong, the idea that we can remain neutral to criminal use of Tor "for the sake of the cause" is also a Bolshevik-style notion of "the end justifies the means."

There are other solutions here. The Navy can make their own white-label circumvention software, and if they are worried about showing up in that capacity as "white-label Navy thing" on servers, they can use various cutaways of their own, either contractors or nonprofits or volunteers in their own network. As I've said time and again, you can have Iowa corn farmers run Tor nodes, not anarchists with purple hair and nose-rings. Then the Navy themselves can monitor the system for misuse by anyone from Russia to child pornographers.

And another solution -- one I would favour -- is to turn Tor over to another ethical nonprofit group -- that would not be the existing Tor Project team! -- and have it built on the premise that in order for the network to succeed, its members MUST trust some stewards to spot-check, monitor, and remove criminals. I would replace the "zebra stripes" theory -- anyone should be allowed to use it to make all the stripes hide the zebras you want to hide -- by saying that some people get to monitor for some stripes.

This notion is abhorrent to the extremists currently running it, who turn a blind eye to drug dealers and child pornographers and hackers stealing NSA documents like Snowden, because they think they "can't" monitor the system as that would defeat the notion of privacy. Nonsense. Nothing online is every really private in the end, as Syverson himself, the original Navy developer has proven, as have other researchers. Without enough watching of the exit nodes, any hostile party can figure out what's up. So the users community itself should try to reduce hostile and criminal use by monitoring, with key word searches, investigation of heightened activity in some "hidden servers" and so on. They should monitor not only for drug dealers but for hostile governments, such as Russia, which has already penetrated the system -- a glaring fact Yasha, soft on the Kremlin, never mentions in any of his rants against Tor.

Any online community has monitors, and there's no reason that the community of Tor users can democratically and transparently chose their monitors.

Andrea Shepherd quit Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life because the CEO at the time refused to concede her demand that users should have absolute encryption and the company be kept out of user communications. The company, however, insisted on being able to monitor the entire system, through key word searches, random inspections and of course response to user abuse reports, to make sure Second Life wasn't used for criminal purposes whether child pornography, drug sales, terrorism or any money-laundering.

Shepherd thought that user communications should be absolutely encrypted and impervious to the platform provider's inspection. This is anarchist extremism and there is no reason we should accept it in the miniature prototype of the Internet that is Second Life, nor accept it in real life on the Internet. Indeed, the iPhone6 encryption is just this challenge which Congress should address.

He did this even more at the 30th CCC when he called for sabotaging and leaking and referenced the NSA's gadget catalogue, which he also published at the same time in Der Spiegel -- not a document taken by Snowden.

This kind of radicalism isn't acceptable in a liberal democratic state under the rule of law. Even the most liberal state needs espionage against enemies that are all too real and secret documents. It's not up to anarchists to undemocratically define and decide this for us all. Andrea Shepherd's ideas are so radical that she thinks "mathematics" -- encryption -- makes the state obsolete. These are people who have advanced the "code as law" concept -- and in their hands especially code is a weapon.

Tor Project should be suspended, then reformed, and we should not be paying for anarchist sabotage with our tax dollars. The issue isn't that this project is run by the US -- which Levine thinks alone discredits it because in his mind, the US is the evil country and opppressive regimes like Russia, Syria, Sudan, Iran, etc. just don't exist in his universe except as victims.

There is a wide variety of circumvention and encryption software that can be used for the purpose of maintaining privacy for those who have legitimate use for it. And it's more than fine to have communities of users monitor themselves so that the software is not used for crime. No one needs to have a child abused in order to keep a victim of domestic abuse safe; no one needs to have illegal drugs sold and addiction to spread in order for someone in Iran to oppose their government. It is possible to do good and prevent evil, but first, you have to discard these caricatures of black-and-white binary 0/1 thinking and realize some ethical and reasonable method is possible.

11/24/2014

In May, when Glenn Greenwald's book No Place to Hide came out on the 13th, within four days, a blogger named Aegis (K.M. Gallagher) discovered that "Cincinnatus" -- a pseudonym that Edward Snowden used to contact Greenwald -- was someone who was tied to Runa Sandvik (@runasand), then a staff member at Tor Project. It turned out that Cincinnatus -- of all people! -- had organized a Crypto Party in Oahu, Hawaii, and had invited Runa as a speaker.

@runasand Runa, did you communicate with Cincinnatus with regard to the Honolulu Cryptoparty? @Cryptomeorg

That let us know that Runa had been in touch with Snowden before he joined Booz, Allen, Hamilton, and before he stole the bulk of his NSA documents.

It had always been my hypothesis that people within the hackers' movement, at Tor or EFF or WikiLeaks or all three or somewhere, were indeed in touch with Snowden long before the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Bart Gelman, and had prompted Snowden with a wishlist of what he should steal, and that he took the job at BHA specifically to steal more, because what he had had access to before that wasn't good enough.

When the revelation that Cinncinatus was Snowden came out, Runa Sandvik spun the story mightily, first in Wired, then in her own column in Forbes. The gullible geek public bought the carefully-constructed narrative -- that Sandvik didn't know much about the guy, that she didn't think much of it, that she was going on vacation anyway, and so on -- and gosh, wasn't Snowden just so awesome, teaching his fellow human beings crypto.

It seems an awfully funny coincidence that Runa just happened to be going on vacation then -- and got there on December 7 for the December 11 Crypto Party and then stayed some undetermined time after that. And then in June 2013, got to take a vacation again from her generous bosses.

Go visit the botanical garden, they said. It will be fun, they said. There are no mosquitos, they said.— Runa A. Sandvik (@runasand) December 7, 2012

Reddit? Really, Edward? This was an AMA thread with five Tor people speaking -- Karen Reilly, the outreach person is mentioned first in the list, then Runa, then others: "People currently answering questions, in addition to Karen and myself, are Roger Dingledine (arma-tor), Nick Mathewson (nickm_tor), Jacob Appelbaum (ioerror), and Erinn Clark (sakhalin)."

So we're to believe that Snowden, a typical arrogant male geek, went to the second woman in the list, and not to Roger Dingledine, who is the most famous in this group, who was in the Navy and was one of the original developers of Tor. That would mean he was roughly Snowden's peer, once having worked in the military -- Snowden may have been discharged from the military after breaking both legs while in army training, but he was in the NSA, with signals intelligence, which has always been closely associated with the Navy. Then there was Appelbaum, in age and hacker cred also a peer of Snowden's -- why didn't he go to him? Why did he pick out Runa from this list?

Snowden would have read about Tor and would know exactly who did what. Why Runa, the "outreach and support" person?

There must have been some other reason he contacted her, or picked her out. Perhaps he read her Forbes articles? Or this is entirely made up?

How did she know what was in Greenwald's book, which hadn't come out yet? Well, it was supposed to come out in April, I remember distinctly the announcement on Amazon.com and the pre-orders. It got shifted. Likely some early copies got out for reviews. Likely someone in the chain somehow leaked some things in it and she heard about it. Somehow, it happened.

Maybe that wasnt her reason for going to Moscow, but we're really going to believe that after meeting Snowden in Honolulu in December 2012 and never telling us until it is exposed accidently, she's going to tell us the truth about what she did in Moscow in April?

It was also a funny coincidence, but it wasn't her first contact with Moscow -- she had been in an online conference on November 27, 2012 shortly before her meeting with Snowden in Honolulu, that was a sort of Crypto Party, although more like a panel discussion, organized by Andrei Soldatov at the Sakharov Center in Moscow.

It's my belief that Sandvik nevertheless contacted Snowden during the April trip to accomplish something that had to be accomplished in person -- perhaps exchanging new keys in person so that no trail would show up. Or perhaps discussing the "narrative" to explain away the Crypto Party.

When everyone began looking for the Oahu Crypto Party at the time, the trail was deleted -- the entire Crypt Party web site was "down". That seemed more than coincidental. And nothing much could be found about it, anyway.

There was a mirror site, but it showed only Cincinnatus as a speaker, and Runa Sandvik, and all the other topics were left blank as to speakers. Funny, no other speakers listed then, or later! Twenty people came, but we have no idea who the other 17 were, other than Snowden, his girlfriend, and Sandvik.

Lindsay Mills, Snowden's girlfriend, was said to take a video, but Runa said in her interview with Wired that the audio turned out to be bad, and it wasn't used. If Lindsay ever put it on her blog, it's gone now. In fact, her blog post for that day is missing from Archive.org. And there's nothing in September that sounds like any CryptoParty.

I've never doubted for a moment that the geeks at Archive.org have had Snowden's back, and they make sure that Lindsay's diary, and the Crypto Party website, and other things, just don't show any Snowden trial anymore, even if there was a snapshot that day. They are not trustworthy stewards of the Internet, as they protect their own from scrutiny.

If you dig around, however, you can find the ubiquitous Pipermail chat from the group, and find that interestingly, Snowden/Cinncinnatus had a message -- some words of advice - to someone who reported that the entire Crypto Party was under attack. That attack was in May 2013, and Snowden, though he was getting ready to finish pulling off his heist and flee to Hong Kong and then Moscow, found time on May 13, 2013 -- just four days before his last day at BHA, and four-five days before his flight to Hong Kong -- to give advice about recaptcha.

Of course, the "Oahu CryptoParty" might have been someone other than Snowden, but I don't think so. That's because no one other than Snowden is ever mentioned -- and now it is defunct, since he fled.

You can find on the mirror site that there were a grand total of two meetings shown on the Oahu CryptoParty list for 2012, which isn't under "North America" in case you were looking there, but under "Oceania" because Hawaii is in the Pacific Ocean. So there was a CryptoParty on September 30, 2012, and December 11, 2012. Then there was one scheduled for February 23, 2013 -- although nothing has been turned up about it.

The person who ran it September 30, 2012 may simply have been a different person. In fact, likely it was, as Snowden acted as if this was his first Crypto Party. Asher Wolf sent him advice as it if were, and the taped "benedictions" from other Crypto Party celebrities. But maybe it was Snowden.

There's reference to both the Japanese CryptoParty in Nagoya and the Oahu Crypto Party being formed at the same time. As Snowden was in Tokyo in 2012 before coming to Hawaii in April 2012, maybe he founded both? Or knew both members in each place?

There was once an @OahuCryptoParty Twitter account -- but it is now "suspended" -- meaning it could be suspended for violation of the rules -- or suspended if Twitter managers suspect it has been hacked or compromised -- or again, because Twitter geeks have Snowden's back, they might suspend an account that might tell something about him -- especially if the feds came looking for it.

I believe @OahuCryptoParty *is* Snowden, and it's awfully interesting to see who talks to this account, when you look through the Twitter feed -- the whole gang:

o Jacob Appelbaum @ioerror - who was brought in by Laura Poitras to help with the comms of the Snowden heist, but who seems to have been elbowed aside by Greenwald, who used Micah Lee to help him learn Tails and Tor -- Micah was the one who sent the package to Greenwald May 11, not Jacob, as I and others once thought (Micah Lee later described all this in a strange tell-all article -- strange, as there was no need to tell all -- but I will return to this in another post.)

@OahuCryptoParty There are two outstanding patches for Thunderbird and that is basically it. It is all documented on the TorBirdy trac/wiki.

But he's not telling the truth, because in fact Parker Higgins communicated with @OahuCryptoParty on December 10, 2012, a day before the CryptoParty in Oahu, as we can see in this tweet also shown above.

That tweet even sounds as if a biography of him was sought because he was going to be a speaker -- the link in the tweet is to his biography.

So what if he went earlier? There was an earlier CryptoParty in September -- did he go to that one and give Snowden the sticker there?

That BlueCoat equipment is found in Syria? And...like that's the main reason Assad is slaughtering people, this Western company?! (It's a particular geek affectation to fuss about Western companies dealing with tyrants instead of the tyrants themselves.) It wouldn't have anything to do with Putin proving Assad with $1 billion in armaments and political backing, now would it?

A Russian with pro-Putin views against Ukraine, constantly tweeting about Assange, WikiLeaks, anti-American conspiracy theories like implying "the US created Bin Ladn" which things like this old 1993 article by Robert Fisk on Bin Ladn that if anything, indicates Saudi backing. Hilariously, BinLadn is quoted as saying "'Personally neither I nor my brothers saw evidence of American help."

This Russian woman is married to a man named Alexander Senko, and they both moved to London. They're artists. Why is @OahuCryptoParty in her tweet cc's, and who is she disparaging, Assange or Morozov?

Funny, then this whole cast of characters shows up on a "privacy geek tour" in August 2014.

So some/all of these people know more than they are saying about "Oahu CryptoParty" but interestingly, Snowden -- if that was who ran it -- had a message on the chat only a few days before he bolted for Hong Kong, on May 13, 2013. (His last day at BHA was May 17, he flew out May 18 and arrived May 19, from all accounts.)

Here it is in case it gets deleted:

Interesting that Snowden/Cincinnatus was still at his CryptoParty post at that late date. That suggests, well, more involvement than just some one-time CryptoParty. Some people think the Oahu CryptoParty didn't even exist, but was made up as a cover for Runa Sandvik and Snowden to meet in real life, perhaps to plan dark nets to hide all that stolen NSA loot, perhaps to exchange keys, so that no trail would be left anywhere. Or, whatever.

Runa was so defensive when asked about Hawaii, back in February. Remember this amazing thread? Edward Lucas and I were denounced for writing that perhaps Jacob Appelbaum had met Snowden in Hawaii. He denied it then later but we don't know if in fact some other comrade of his met with Snowden -- and it turns out that Runa Sandvik had in December! And certainly Appelbaum -- and the other Spring Breakers -- overlapped for a time. There was an enormous back and forth on this with Appelbaum accusing Lucas of not fact-checking his book and merely because he linked to Streetwise Professor's blog -- which in fact was speculative. Appelbaum accused us falsely of libel.

Streetwise's theory was that Snowden in fact went to Appelbaum first, as a coder. And we've just seen that Sandwik -- who actually was the very first to be in contact with Snowden out of all the Snowdenistas, in person -- claims that Snowden bypassed Appelbaum in the Reddit thread and headed for her. Of course, we don't know that in fact they didn't meet years earlier...

So, it was more than fine to speculate about any Snowden liaisons during the Spring Break of Code, it was hardly the crazy and libelous thing Appelbaum implied -- at a time that we didn't know yet about Runa's meeting! -- and truly, it didn't matter if this was on another island as they could hop to the other one.

And what's operative about all this is that drilling on the SBOC, we got hostile responses by people *who knew there was a CryptoParty run by Snowden in December 2012*. Who know Runa had already met with Snowden by then (!). And yet they pretended we were libelous liars.

And these are all people who talked to @OahuCryptoParty -- likely Snowden, too -- in January 2013.

-- a child drawing a picture of a Nyan cat, and a picture of the dead body of Kareem Fakhrawi tortured to death with no mercy, in Bahrain, not visible there but visible at the link (warning: graphic).

The cause of human rights in Bahrain is one that leftists/progressives/anarchists often pick up because they can use it to bash the US, since the US can be shown to be hypocritical by propping up this oppressive government.

Then there's Jason Axelson -- that was who I thought was behind Cincinnatus in the first place, although it turned out he wasn't, although involved in Hi Capacity.

Jason, who is @bostonvaulter on Twitter is a Hawaii-based Software developer. Jason, like Austen, strikes me as one of those coders who works all day intensively, and doesn't blab and politik the way @ioerror and some of the others do. At any rate, he isn't talking about whatever he knows about Snowden. He's never once mentioned him, or crypto, on his Twitter feed. He cared to retweet the event about the 3D Christmas ornaments, and upcoming events about HiCap, but not the CryptoParty.

Here's a meeting at Box Jelly in February 2013, the space behind Fishcake where the CryptoParty was held, but no Snowden. I somehow concluded awhile ago after canvassing the Maker parties in Tokyo that Snowden wasn't part of the Maker/Hackerspace set although naturally he fit in with the CryptoParty crowd. Happy to be corrected.

UPDATE

Finally, there's a reason Parker goes to Hawaii a lot. His wealthy parents own an estate there, he mentions it on Instagram:

And then it turns out his parents have been in the papers regarding Obama's stay at this very estate. They are large donors to the Democratic Party and also support various liberal and leftist causes; his mother is on the board of the Natural Resources Defence Council.

Parker went on vacation to this home at least twice in the last year, and perhaps invited his posse of friends over when they all went to see Snowden's former home, which is like visiting Elvis' ranch for them.

He said he would be "back" to @OahuCryptoParty as if he had already met him and already been there to see him. Again, was he at the September 30, 2012 CryptoParty? Did he befriend Snowden there or in some other way, perhaps there were mutual acquaintances?

One Sandvik met Snowden, did they stay in touch with him and were they involved in his plot to take down the NSA?

He is an avid fan of CryptoParties and has run the one in San Franisco himself. Is it possible that he helped with the Oaha one?

I've always wondere if there was some hideaway, some helper, some secret place that Snowden and Lindsay could have gone to when they moved out of their house on May 1, or earlier, but before they went to the new house - of which we don't have a single picture -- and the picture of Lindsay and Snowden "carpet-dancing" is in fact taken in their old home, as I will prove in my next post.

And maybe that was Parker's family's estate. It might even be that he had friends over there or let them stay there, and the parents were none the wiser as they were based in California and only there some times during the year, evidently.

Once again I marvel at someone who is so wealthy and privileged, who is busy trying to take livelihoods away from artists with his ferocious battle against copyright. He never shuts up about it, purveying numerous falsehoods all day and all week claiming that piracy actually helps artists "get the word out."

The encryption that could have served to protect digital content on line is sneered at and derided by Parker and EFF -- such strong encryption can only exist for their privacy -- even as they spend their lives spilling their details out on social media.